New united.com feature

I couldn't find a consolidated thread of all new .bomb features people have found, so I thought I'd start one. (Apologies if this "discovery" was already reported, or if there is already a consolidated thread. I didn't think this really fit with the beta thread or the sticky.)

Here's one I just found. Select a flight in My Itineraries. Then go to Planning travel/Shop for flights. The city pair and dates are pre-entered! I've only tried this for a simple round trip (as that's all we have currently booked), so I don't know what you'll get if you try this with a complicated routing, but it would be interesting to find out...

There are two that I've just noticed. One is that the bomb will explicitly allow you to price out multi-city itineraries where the departure airport needn't be the same as the arrival airport from the previous leg (e.g. LAX-IAD, DCA-ORD, ORD-LAX). I always found this frustrating about the previous version of the site. Yes, I would sometimes see it pulling up such itineraries when pricing multi-city trips, but there wasn't a way, unless I missed something, to force the old .bomb to do this.

Another is that you are told an unambiguous time when holding a reservation. Instead of being told that my reservation would be held until midnight on December 12th, I was just told that it'll be held until 11:59pm on December 12th. I think the former is a questionable way to put it; the latter is obvious. (OK, that's not so much of a feature as it is a clarification, but that one always bugged me.)

There are still things about the booking engine that I don't like (the capability to see which flights are on sale, which was in the old version, has disappeared), but I think this engine is an improvement over the old one.

PS - Oh, yeah! This version allows one to search for *A flights ... not that I've seen it pull any up for me yet.

When you download flights to calender it puts in correct flight times in notes but puts flights at 2 hours earlier in the actual apt I want the flight time for my pda - not a time 2 hours earlier!

On the previous version of the united.com website, you could accomplish this by adding in a segment "by car" or something like that. You just needed to put in a leg from IAD - DCA that was not "by air."

Correct. You added a "segment" with the choice "Travel By Ground To"

On the whole, I liked that option better.

And it may be in the giant thread, but I can't figure out how to see fare classes on the new site.

Hover over Flight info while logged in, and it should show you the breakdown. What browser are you using if it isn't showing up?

Maybe the two-hour difference has to do with time zone? CST vs PST is two hours.

Thanks, I'll try that (I haven't yet tried it). I did like the old multi-city option that showed all the fare classes available on a given segment.

Well, I'm not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, so it's no surprise that this never occurred to me. However, cblaisd, I'm surprised to read that you think this is a better way of doing it! Why is that? Even though I now know how to do this on the old .bomb, I definitely prefer the new interface.

I have found that mousing over the flight details gives this information (with Netscape and Firefox), but I did prefer the way it used to be explicitly laid out.

Probably because a) I'm something of a Luddite, and b) I haven't had the opportunity to mess much with the new format because I haven't needed to schedule a trip.

It now shows Z fares when they exist. I don't recall the old version doing that.

On the old website the 'travel by ground' that you had to enter basically amounted to manually adding an ARUNK into the reservation.

But all this back-and-forth over the new vs. old united website misses the point. United Connection disk-based software was better.

Irrelevant.

Oh, c'mon, I was teasing.

It did. I bought many Z fares on the old site.